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“What are you doing here? HOW are you here?” Natasha hissed.
Clint hunched his shoulders guiltily. “Hitchhiked.”
“You hitchhiked fifty miles in how long?”
“Trucker. I don’t know. She reminded me of Large Marge.”
“She probably WAS Large Marge.”
“Children.” Phil hissed from inside the shop.
Whoops, he’d picked the locks and gotten them in while they’d been bickering.
Not that this area ran to alarm systems. They’d been mildly surprised the door was locked. It was a pitch black October night in rural northeast Ohio. It was only about nine in the evening but they already had the single traffic light nearby on yellow flash for the overnight.
She hated Ohio.
“Do you suppose we could take this seriously?” Phil continued hissing once they were all crowded into the old watchmaker’s shop.
“No.” Natasha snapped. “I refuse. It’s Ohio.”
“I hate Ohio.”
“Shut up,” they both told Clint.
“Seriously, what the fuck are you doing here?” Natasha demanded while Phil tried to search something, anything, without bumping into them.
“May threw me off the team. Something about how she knows what I’m like in the Midwest and she’s not allowed to use tranquilizer darts on me.”
“So you blew Akron, came further into this…” Natasha gave a purely Russian wave of her hand, “voluntarily, to bug the shit out of us.”
“...it could be argued.” Clint nodded.
“We do not have enough room in here for three people, especially when two of them are useless bags of meat at the moment.” Phil glared. “One of you take watch outside and one of you get to work or so help me.”
Nat pointed imperiously to the door.
Clint drooped a little, and stepped outside.
“I’m shooting May.” Nat told Phil.
“Not now. Oh eight four now, giving May hell later.”
- A -
The first hour was frustrating. By the second, Phil was planning what he was going to do to the person who gave him the intel. Then, “where did Barton go?”
Nat looked out the window. No Clint. “Son of a BITCH.”
Phil put back the drawer he’d opened. “I hate Ohio.”
Outside, there was still no Clint. A quick circuit of the building. No trace, no hint, no-
Nat tilted her head. “Is that a CAMEL?”
“I fucking hate Ohio.” Phil broke into a run behind Natasha.
Clint met them about a quarter mile down the road, riding a-
“A motherfucking CAMEL.” Nat ground out. She looked like she couldn’t decide which of them to punch first, Clint or the camel.
“There’s a large animal rescue back there.” Clint told them, delighted. “They’ve got a couple buffalo, and a moose, and-”
“Put the goddamn camel back.” Phil told him.
“Oh, we’re probably good, the cops are busy at a football game across town-” flashing lights went on in the distance, and Clint dismounted the camel without having it kneel, tripped, and fell flat on his face.
“YOU! FREEZE!” was blasted out, and the car roared as it accelerated.
“Standard protocol YOU ASSHOLE.” Phil hissed, and faded back into the woods with Natasha. They stood back and watched as Clint was cuffed and shoved into the back of the cruiser.
“Shame they didn’t bounce his head off the roof first.” Natasha said wistfully.
Phil pulled out his emergency pack of cigarettes and lit one. Natasha nipped it out of his fingers and took a drag, so he lit another. “How long do you want to give him?”
Nat made a Russian noise in her throat. “What are the odds of us finding this damned artifact tonight?”
Phil sighed. He hated to admit it, but after two hours, he was pretty sure the oh eight four wasn’t there. “Slim.”
“I guess we can go get the asshole, then.”
- A -
Standard protocol, when in this situation, was for the person arrested to escape the police and meet up with the rest of the team at a place that had been predetermined in case of emergency. Fortunately, Clint had paid attention to both briefings on the way to Ohio, so he knew he needed to get to a small hill in the middle of nowhere – no roads, not even a cow track – where Phil and Nat would be waiting for him.
It was only Clint and a single cop in the cruiser, so he opened the handcuffs (he kept a key in his back pocket for that), left them on the seat for the cop (handcuffs were expensive), and then bailed out of the cruiser at the first dark stop sign.
Which was all of them, this far out into the nowhere in Ohio. About a mile up the road in the other direction, there was a flasher light, yellow in one direction, red in the other. Big city.
He sprinted for about fifty yards, then laid in a depression in the ground and didn’t move.
The cop spent about ten minutes wandering around with a flashlight (he had no idea how to do a zone by zone search), then muttered some profanities and drove away.
Okay. So he was now free, but still stuck in the middle of nowhere in Ohio.
It smelled like trees.
- A -
He and Natasha made it to the prearranged rendezvous point, and no Clint.
Phil ground his teeth for a while. “Do you suppose he knows where the meetup point is?”
Nat nodded. “He usually listens to any briefing he can on things like this, he likes to know what everyone’s doing.”
“Did he look at the map?” Phil asked the logical followup question.
“No idea,” Nat admitted.
Phil patted his pocket for another cigarette, but Nat instead reached into a pocket and handed him a flask. After a moment, he shrugged and took a swig.
High-quality vodka, as expected.
He passed it back and Nat took a swig, put it away.
Phil began composing the list of things he would be leaving out of the mission report.
- A -
Clint was reasonably sure he was headed in the right direction – in that he was following the stars east, and he was pretty sure the cop had been taking him west, and the meetup point was the only high ground in the area, so-
“Need help?” a guy asked behind him.
Clint didn’t quite hold back the screech, jumped, and turned.
Then he screeched again. “What the hell?”
The faintly transparent, all-white – ghostly white, not caucasian white - guy was standing in a patch of darkness, smoking a cigarette Clint couldn’t smell, other hand shoved into the pocket of a beat-up pair of jeans. “Thought I’d help a brother wandering around out here, but if you want to be that way about it, I’ll go back to fishing,” the guy rolled his eyes, tossed down the cigarette butt and ground it out.
That was when Clint noticed the US Marines tat on the guy’s forearm.
“I’m, uh, I’m looking for the highest hill in the area,” Clint said. He shut his eyes and visualized the map, and also blocked out the apparent ghost in front of him. “Cow pasture to north and south, woods east, farm buildings about half a mile south.” He opened his eyes again and the guy was still there.
The guy pointed, and Clint mentally marked the direction, where the guy was, what tree he was pointing at. “Cool, uh, thanks,” Clint told him.
“Act your age, not your shoe size,” the guy said with a shake of his head, added, “walleye are running up at Lake Erie, I’ve got places to be,” and sort of faded away.
Okay then.
After a moment’s hesitation, Clint went to where the guy – fellow Marine – had been standing, turned toward the tree he’d pointed at, took a bearing with his pocket compass and the stars, then started walking.
He wished he’d thought to ask how far it was.
- A -
They were still standing around on the goddamn hill, waiting, or rather they’d gone down the side of the hill a little so they weren’t silhouetted by the sky begging someone to shoot them, and crouched to wait for Clint, when down the hill and out across one of the fields, at least a mile from the road they’d left, a giant cross suddenly lit on fire.
“Oh HELL no,” Natasha said. Fucking Midwest, full of racists and bigots and weirdos. Nothing ever went according to plan and the place always felt like those old episodes of the Twilight Zone Clint had made her watch during her ‘American Lessons’. Not only for the weird as hell, the place was grey and there was always this lurking dread, a sort of waiting for something creepy to happen.
“We are not getting involved in local politics,” Phil told her sternly.
“YOU may not be,” Natasha answered, and stalked off down the hill. No way in hell she was going to ignore this shit.
Phil swore, then came along, she knew he would.
She had to hop a creek and skirt a cow pasture, and by then the men – ten assholes – had gotten on their bedsheets and white hoods. They were chanting something stupid, Midwestern non-accents rising to the sky. Natasha didn’t hesitate, stalked into the middle of them, stood there glaring as the chanting tapered off.
Finally one guy said in a leering voice, “can we help you, sweetheart?”
“Yeah,” Natasha said, “don’t call me sweetheart.” Then she punched him in the throat.
By the time Phil caught up to her, all ten were down, out cold or half dead, she didn’t care, and she’d pulled out a knife and started cutting their clothes off.
“What the hell are you doing?” Phil demanded.
“Teaching them that stupidity is painful,” Nat replied.
When she was done, she gathered up all she could carry, and Phil sighed and gathered up the rest, followed her without a word as she located the dairy farm’s manure pit and threw everything in. He threw in his load, too.
You could always count on Phil, Natasha thought fondly.
When they got back to the hill, Clint was there. “Where’ve you guys been?” he asked.
“Shut up. Both of you don’t talk to me, at least until debrief, possibly forever.”
Clint looked at her, and she did her best predatory smile. “Who’d you kill?”
“Nobody, but I hope their dicks freeze to the ground,” Natasha went off after Phil.
Clint shut up and hiked.
- A -
They arrived at their planned meeting place with May – a small bar named Mister Bilbo’s, not that far from the University of Akron, where May had been breaking into the polymer science building to delete some information and retrieve another oh eight four. Phil was greeted at the door with a statue of Bilbo Baggins, styled after the hideous nineteen seventy-eight animated attempt at Lord of the Rings. He bared his teeth at it. Two steps past the atrocity, and he spotted May and two young agents – the hackers got younger every year, he swore – hunched over reddish beers at a table near a juke box.
Clint went straight to the juke, pumped in a handful of coins, and began flipping through the selections, giggling occasionally. He punched in some numbers and something he thought might be Echo and the Bunnymen started playing.
Nat went straight to the bar. He sat down next to Melinda. “What is that?” Phil asked, nodding at the drink.
“Killian’s Red, imported from Colorado,” May replied, and took a swig. “It doesn’t suck. We’re green. You?”
“Couldn’t find it. Then Clint happened,” Phil told her. “I’m filing a complaint later about you kicking him loose.”
“Even if Fury suspends me for a month, no regrets. What did he do?” May asked curiously. ‘This time’ was very heavily implied.
Clint’s chaotic trail of destruction was legendary and everyone at SHIELD enjoyed hearing tales of his adventures - from a safe distance. It was rumored that his complete randomness was what made him so lucky. Phil thought that Clint’s extreme intelligence was the source of both the randomness and the ‘luck’. He considered how to explain the entire night, then settled for “Clint stole a camel.”
“In bumfuck Ohio,” May answered, not quite a question.
Her two minions were hanging on every word; Clint was somewhat mythical among the younger agents.
“Some kind of large animal rescue,” Phil shrugged. “After that it was the usual, arrest, escape, meet up at rendezvous place, KKK, cow manure,” he broke off, and gave a heartfelt “thank you” to Natasha, who put a martini in front of him and sat down with a bottle of vodka and a shot glass.
“Uh huh,” May finally decided after a long silence, took a long drink of her beer.
“I hate Ohio,” Phil muttered into his martini, and took a long drink. He was amazed to find it was perfect.
Natasha held up her shot glass in a toast, and intoned, “at least it’s not Youngstown,” and tossed back the first double vodka.
Phil didn’t have the heart to tell her exfil was through the Pittsburgh airport.